Akira Shirakawa <[email protected]> wrote: > > Disqus is indeed more user friendly, but the amount of Facebook likes is > in my opinion a very good indicator of how popular a story is. >
Ah! I did not think of that. That is probably a good metric. It is still self-selected, and not a random group, but the extremists will have only one vote each. If the number of likes is sufficiently high I guess the effects of extremists at both ends would be diluted. I guess what you are saying is that we can look at articles which are generally in favor of cold fusion and compare them to ones that attack it, and see which is more popular with Facebook. If they are both published about the same time that should be a valid comparison. We would be looking at the opinions of the general public rather than academic scientists, but it would be useful information. I wonder if we can establish a trend line with this data? I confess I have never looked at Facebook and I have no idea how it works or what is in it. I gather it is all the rage. The movie "The Social Network" was interesting. - Jed
